Marketplace Integration Glossary: 34 Key Terms

Most of the terms you hear around marketplace integration describe simple things; the trouble is that everyone uses a different word for them. This glossary explains the 34 terms a multichannel seller or operations manager meets most often. Each entry links to a longer article when there is more to say.

Product and catalog terms

SKU

Stock keeping unit: the code you assign to tell products apart inside your own business. Red in size 38 and red in size 39 are two SKUs, because they are counted and sold separately. Every mapping the integration builds rests on this code, so a product must never carry two of them, and a retired code must never be reused for something else. Keep codes short, stable when the product title changes, and free of spaces and accented characters; some marketplace panels truncate or reject long or unusual ones. See matching products by SKU and barcode.

EAN / GTIN

The product's international barcode number, issued through GS1. Marketplaces recognize the same product across different sellers by this number, which is why listings that share a barcode are grouped on one product page. That makes the barcode the bridge between your own SKU and the marketplace's product record. Each variant needs its own barcode; one number copied across every size breaks matching and writes one size's stock to another. A missing or borrowed barcode ties your listing to the wrong product, and marketplaces reject numbers whose length or check digit is invalid. See the barcode and GS1 EAN guide.

Variant

Versions of one product separated by color, size, or volume. On the marketplace they usually sit under a single listing, but in stock each is a separate SKU with its own barcode, its own price, and its own quantity. Matching, stock sync, and pricing therefore all run at variant level: match the parent alone and black M sells out while black L still shows as available. Color and size names often differ from channel to channel, so translation rules are defined once and applied across the catalog. See variant management.

Master catalog

The single source of truth for product data, usually the ERP or the platform behind your own store: Shopify, WooCommerce, ikas, Ticimax, T-Soft, İdeasoft, or an XML feed. The integration reads products, variants, barcodes, and prices from here and sends them out to the channels. The rule that follows matters in daily work: an edit made only on a channel is unknown to the master, so the next update overwrites it. Decide early which system has the last word, and make corrections there rather than in a marketplace panel.

XML feed

A file that exports product data as a structured list: code, barcode, title, price, stock, and images in fixed fields. It is used both to carry products from a store into the integration and to send them out to platforms such as Google Merchant. As a source it is convenient, but it is read on a schedule, and the interval between reads is time in which channel stock can drift from reality. Keep the SKU and barcode fields filled on every row; blanks are where matching fails. See XML integration and Google Merchant feeds.

Quality score

The marketplace's own rating of a listing, based on missing images, a thin title, the wrong category, or unfilled attributes. A low score pushes the listing down in search before it costs you anything visible, which is why it is easy to miss for months. The quality tab collects these findings per product and channel, listing missing color, title, and category, so the gaps are closed from one list instead of portal by portal and the correction is pushed back to the channel. See product content and quality score.

Ownership flag

A marker recording who manages a product's stock and price on a given channel: this integration, or another system. It exists to stop two tools writing to the same field, which is the hardest error to diagnose, because both sides look correct in their own records while the values on the channel contradict each other within hours. In Bulutegra it is set per product and channel, so channels that stay on an old tool during a migration are left untouched while the rest are handed over one by one.

Stock and order terms

Stock sync

Reducing a product's quantity on every other channel as soon as it sells on one. This is the foundation of multichannel selling and the reason integrations exist at all. What matters is not that an update happens but how quickly: when the gap between a sale and its arrival on the other channels is measured in hours, selling the same unit twice is a matter of time; in seconds, the risk practically disappears. Manual updates and scheduled feed reads both widen that gap. See stock sync and overselling.

Overselling

Selling the same last unit on two channels at once: one pair of shoes in the warehouse, an order from one marketplace in the evening and another an hour later. One customer has to be cancelled. The cost is not the product but the cancellation rate, which marketplaces track as a seller performance metric, and the review that tends to follow. Thresholds and consequences differ by marketplace and change over time, so check the current seller agreement. The cause is always the same: stock reaching the other channels too late.

Single stock pool

All channels drawing on one real quantity instead of each holding a reserve of its own. Ten units are not split two per channel; every channel sees ten, an order anywhere takes the pool to nine, and nine is written everywhere. Splitting stock per channel does not prevent overselling; it costs you sales instead, because one channel runs out while another sits on units nobody can reach. If you want to keep the last few units for your own store, that is a rule on top of the pool, not a separate stock.

Low-stock alert

A product falling below a threshold you set. It surfaces as a warning in the panel and on the mobile interface, and what it really buys is time: time to reorder, to slow a campaign, or to close a listing before the last unit sells on the wrong channel. Thresholds are worth setting per variant rather than per product, since it is one size that runs out, not the style. When goods are accepted at the warehouse by barcode, the pool updates and the alert closes on its own. See low stock and days of cover.

Days of cover

An estimate of how many days the current stock will last at the recent rate of sale. It turns a quantity into a decision: the same forty units can be a whole season's cover for a slow product and a couple of days for a fast one. Velocity is taken from all connected channels together, since a product that is quiet on one may be selling steadily on another. It is the number to look at before a campaign, when the question is not whether you have stock but whether you have enough to last the event.

Negative stock

Stock falling below zero in the system. It is never a real quantity; it is the trace of something else, usually a counting error, a return recorded before the goods arrived, an order written twice, or two systems writing to the same field. Left alone it spreads, because the channels receive a value that cannot be true and every report built on it stops meaning anything. Products that go negative belong on the count list; the correction is made in the source system and read back out to the channels. See stock counts and negative stock errors.

Order transfer

Writing a marketplace order into the ERP or the panel with its customer, line items, carrier, and payment details, so invoicing, picking, and accounting continue in your own routine instead of in a marketplace portal. Line-level detail is what makes the rest possible: a credit note for a single item, a partial return, a per-product contribution figure. Orders from every channel land in one list with channel tabs, date range, and SKU search, and Nebim V3, Logo, Mikro, and SAP receive them automatically. See multichannel order management.

Partial return

A return covering only some lines of an order: three items shipped, one sent back. It has to be handled separately in three places. In stock, only the returned unit comes back, and only once the warehouse has accepted it. In invoicing, the credit note covers the affected line alone. In settlement, the commission for that line should be credited back, and is not always. Because the order was written line by line when it was transferred, each of the three is resolved without unpicking the whole order. See order cancellation and partial return flow.

Returns portal

A page where the customer signs in with an email address and order code and opens a return themselves, instead of writing to you and waiting for an answer. The system issues the return code; the parcel is scanned in at the warehouse and marked saleable or damaged; saleable units go back to the single stock pool and every channel sees the new quantity. If the customer wants a different size instead, an exchange order is created from the same screen. Marketplace and own-store returns sit in one list, separated by channel tabs. See marketplace returns management.

Pricing, commission, and reconciliation terms

BuyBox

Among several sellers offering the same product, the one the marketplace connects to its add-to-cart button. Most of the sales on a shared listing go through it, so it is less a badge than the difference between selling and merely being listed. Price is the visible factor, but delivery time, stock reliability, cancellation rate, and seller rating all count, and the weighting belongs to the marketplace and changes. That is why it is rarely won on price alone, and why a floor price matters once a price contest starts. See the Amazon BuyBox guide.

Repricing

Updating prices automatically against competitor prices and rules you define, rather than by hand across portals. The rules are what make it safe: a floor no suggestion may cross, a ceiling, and a decision about which products take part at all. Bulutegra offers a BuyBox suggestion for Trendyol and floor-ceiling rules for Walmart, and neither produces a price below the floor. Products whose contribution is already thin are usually better kept out of a price contest than entered into one. See price sync, repricing, and BuyBox.

Floor price

The price a product must never fall below on any channel. It is a hard limit rather than a guideline: campaign discounts, repricing suggestions, and manual edits all stop at it, and an update that would cross it never reaches the channel. A floor is only as sound as the calculation behind it, which means commission, VAT, shipping, and return risk deducted from the selling price. A floor set by feel shows up later as negative contribution on the profitability page. See the floor price rule.

Price matrix

A single table showing list price, sale price, and floor price for each product on each channel. Its value is that the answer to "what does this product cost where" stops being four portals and becomes one screen, including the places where a price drifted and nobody noticed. Variants are held separately, since sizes rarely share one price for long. The same matrix feeds the repricing rules and the campaign calculator, so a floor entered once applies everywhere a price is produced.

Commission

The marketplace's share of every sale. It varies by category, by campaign, and over time, and it is rarely the only deduction: shipping contributions, service fees, and promotional charges sit alongside it. Check the current rate in the marketplace's own seller agreement rather than working from memory, and recalculate when a product changes category. What you calculate should then be compared with what was actually deducted, because the two do not always agree, and the settlement report is where the difference becomes visible. See commissions and deductions.

Settlement

The amount a marketplace pays you after its deductions, reported per period against the orders in that period. It is the only figure that matches the money arriving in your bank account, which is why the distance between order value and settlement is where a channel's real margin lives. Settlement lines are linked to your own order records by order or package number, so each payment can be traced back to what was sold. Reading one line by line is slow work the first time and quick once the layout is familiar. See how to read a Trendyol settlement report.

Reconciliation

Comparing the settlement report line by line with your own order and return records, and following up whatever does not match. Three findings recur: an order that was delivered but never paid, a return whose commission was never credited back, and an order that ends up negative once deductions are applied. Each needs a status, a claim reference, and a note, because resolution usually spans more than one period. Done every period it is routine work; skipped for a quarter it turns into archaeology. See settlement and commission reconciliation.

Missing payout

An order that shows as delivered but has no matching payment in the settlement report. It is invisible without reconciliation, because nothing about the order itself looks wrong: the customer received the goods and the channel reports the order as complete. Once found, it is raised with the marketplace as a claim and followed until it is settled, which can take more than one reporting period. Tracked with a status and a note it gets resolved; noticed in passing and left alone, it quietly becomes a write-off.

Contribution per channel

What is left from a channel's sales once commission, shipping, VAT, and return risk are deducted. It answers the question revenue cannot: which channel actually makes money. A channel with the highest turnover can sit at the bottom of this list once returns are counted, while a smaller channel with few returns turns out to be the profitable one. Calculated per product as well as per channel, it also tells you which products are worth defending in a price contest and which to leave alone. See marketplace performance reports.

Cross-border terms

Micro-export

Retail exports from Türkiye below a set value and weight limit, cleared through a simplified customs procedure that the carrier handles rather than a customs broker. Most sellers shipping single parcels from Etsy, Amazon, or eBay use this route. The limits and the procedure are set by regulation and change, so confirm the current figures rather than assuming last year's. In daily operation it means currency, customs data, and paperwork are prepared when the order arrives, not the evening before the courier does. See micro-export and ETGB order flow.

ETGB

The Electronic Commerce Customs Declaration: the declaration a carrier files on your behalf for micro-export shipments, in place of a full declaration prepared by a broker. It is the document proving the goods left the country, which is what makes it necessary when VAT is reclaimed, and it is also what ties an individual parcel to an export record in your accounts. Keeping each declaration matched to the order it belongs to is the part that pays off later, when a refund is claimed and the paperwork has to line up.

Size conversion

Translating a product's size into the destination country's system, so the customer orders the size they expect rather than the one printed on your label. The rules come from the product's own size chart rather than a general table, since charts differ by brand and category; for US orders, sizes can be shifted one step up according to that chart. The conversion runs on top of the matching table without changing it, so the order still reaches the ERP with your own size. See international size and measurement conversion.

Exchange rate management

The rule deciding which rate a foreign-currency price uses and when that price is updated. It is a pricing decision more than an accounting one: leave a rate stale and a floor calculated in lira quietly stops holding, while updating on every small move makes prices flicker in front of customers. Currency data is prepared when the order arrives and written to the ERP with it, so the figure on the invoice is the figure the order was taken at. See multi-currency and exchange rate management.

Setup and operations terms

API

The official connection a marketplace or an ERP exposes so other systems can read orders and write stock and prices. It is the alternative to a person copying values between portals, and the difference is not only speed: a write through an API reports back whether it succeeded. Access keys are issued from your own seller panel and belong to your account, not to the integrator. An API is also the honest limit of any integration, since a channel allows only what its own interface allows, and it can slow down or stop answering.

Shadow mode

The setup phase, usually one to two weeks, in which the integration reads everything and writes nothing. The panel shows side by side what it would have written and what each channel currently holds, and the differences become the list you work through: mismatched products, missing barcodes, a channel still being updated by an old tool. Because nothing is written, none of those errors touches live sales. It is the cheapest place to find them, and the step most often skipped under time pressure. See testing an integration in shadow mode.

Handover

Switching write access on channel by channel once the shadow mode figures reconcile: low-volume channels first, stock before price, with the ownership flag updated at every step. The point of the order is that anything still wrong surfaces on a small channel on a quiet day rather than everywhere at once. A channel that remains on another system is simply not handed over yet, and its flag keeps the integration from writing there in the meantime. See integration setup in 4 steps.

Channel monitoring

Checking continuously that every channel still answers and that orders are still arriving from each of them. The failure it catches is a quiet one: a channel does not announce that it has stopped. Orders simply stop, and a marketplace that is no longer receiving stock updates keeps selling the quantity it last knew about. Bulutegra raises an alert and a notification on your phone when a channel goes silent, and past outages stay listed on the system health screen, so a pattern is visible rather than guessed at.

Roles and 2FA

Permission groups such as Admin, Content, Warehouse, Returns, Accounting, and Reporting, plus two-factor authentication on each account. The roles are not bureaucracy: a warehouse user scanning returns has no reason to see settlement figures, and a content editor has no reason to be able to change a floor price. Narrow permissions also limit how far a mistake or a lost password can reach, and because everyone signs in with their own account, an action can be traced to a person. See security in marketplace integration.

A reading order for newcomers

For a business just moving to multichannel selling, a sensible order is:

1. Settle SKU, EAN, and variants first; nothing else works on a messy catalog.
2. Then understand stock sync, the single stock pool, and the ownership flag; these three prevent overselling.
3. Move on to settlement and reconciliation; start following the money from month one.
4. Add micro-export, ETGB, and size conversion when you go cross-border.

How it works with Bulutegra

Most terms in this glossary correspond to a screen or tab in the Bulutegra Integration Panel, from stock and price sync to settlement reconciliation and the returns portal. You can see the 24 supported marketplaces in the channels section.

To see how these terms play out in your own operation, request a demo.